Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,2
him from under a scar-wrinkled, stitched-open eyelid.
“If you insist,” she rasped, the inside of her mouth bright and blister raw. “Take him.”
The windows smashed, shards of stained glass bright as they rained down into the church. Splinters of it caught in the dead priest’s coat and lay in bright flakes on the puddle of his blood. The Numitor instinctively turned his head away, one hand raised to shield his eyes, and felt the needle pricks of it against his skin.
“Old wolf,” something slurred, the words wet as though it had to chew them out, “Old man. Easy prey.”
The Numitor dropped his hand. Threads of blood dribbled down his palm and dripped onto the stone. Three raw-boned things—all broken bones and twisted flesh—jumped down into the church. Bones poked out of them at strange angles, broken and taped back together with straps of muscle, and hair sprouted in mangy lines and patches of matted, tawny fur. Inked lines pulled out of true over humps of muscle that bulged at shoulder and hip, sutured lines pulled tight enough to tear and peel. Broken, ragged bone stuck out of their mouths, between and behind small human teeth, and the insides of their mouths were bloody red bags of skin.
He had seen monsters before. When he was young, the Wild had still spread across the world, thin in places, pulled taut over worked stone and mathematics that merchants brought back from the East, but deep as a lake in others. Things had lived in those places, monsters that no human had seen and lived to spread stories about and that wolves were smart enough to hold their tongue on.
Even centuries back, things like this in a town they’d burned. Twisted bones and monstrous stories had been blamed on the plague, and after some thought, the survivors of the neighboring towns had chosen to believe it.
But he’d never seen the ink he’d worked into his sons’ skins strained over the leathered hide of a thing.
The Numitor let the wolf have him. The huge gray dire wolf, built with the shoulders and jaws to take down an Irish elk, to fight off a bear, snarled and lunged for the monster that wore his son.
Or had been his son.
Chapter One—Jack
THE BLADE hurt least the first time it went under Jack’s skin. In the moment, as the old bitch sliced him from hip to hip and unzipped him like a coat, he hadn’t thought that was true, not as she pinched the flap of his flesh between bony fingers and peeled it off his bones, the raw crackle of torn fibers lost under the raw scrape of his screams.
Then it grew back.
Soft skin, raw nerve endings, virgin flesh.
Then the old bitch started again, and it hurt more this time. And the next. The next….
Jack startled out of the memory. The back of his throat felt caked, thick with the taste of his own pain, and a snarl tried to find fangs to twist over. His heart hammered against his breastbone, alarmed at the phantom threat of pain, and he reached out blindly for Danny.
He was there, curled against Jack’s side under a tangle of blankets. Jack gripped his forearm for a moment—warm skin and muscle under a scratchy Aran sleeve—and then rolled away from him. He sat up, the stink of his own sweat with him, and caught the jet-black glitter of eyes in the dark on the other side of the car.
Wolf eyes saw better in the dark, but even skin-side Jack wasn’t human. It took a second for his eyes to adjust, but once they did, he picked out the silhouette of the little god sitting cross-legged on one of the crates. If Jack had been a god, even a minor one, he’d have picked a better body to steal than Nick Blake’s. Even the heavy wool coat he wore didn’t add enough bulk to his scrawny frame, and he had the face of a ferret behind that nose.
Maybe a bird. Definitely not a wolf.
Yet Gregor loved him. Jack still wasn’t sure what put him on his heels more, that his brother could love or that he loved someone that had been—mostly—human at one point.
“You should sleep,” Jack said. His voice sounded rough as it squeezed out of his throat, and it still tasted of blood. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and was glad it was dark. He didn’t need to see if his dreams had clawed his throat raw again.